DESIGNING A LEARNING AID TO ASSIST THE DYSLEXIC CHILDREN WITH WRITING DIFFICULTIES

Dyslexia is a learning disability which makes the individuals unable to develop the age appropriate and ability appropriate reading and writing skills, often negatively affecting both their academic achievements and self-image. The lack of dyslexia awareness and specialized teaching training prevents the identification as well as remediation of the dyslexic children at early stages in Pakistan. There are also prominent affordance and accessibility issues regarding the remedial help and assistive technology adoption. Use of assistive technology has proved to turn a learning difficulty into a learning difference. Therefore, this research aimed to take advantage of the modern mobile technology features to ensure the availability of an assistive handwriting learning aid based on the usability requirements and developmental progression of dyslexic children to optimize basic handwriting skills without need of one-to-one assistance along with valid and reliable measurement and representation of learning progress.

The specialized remedial teachers of dyslexia stated both the functional as well as non-functional requirements of targeted user population using questionnaire. Keeping in mind the diverse preferences of dyslexic children, the android based application designed for dyslexic children is learner-centered as the development process considered the potential users, environment and tasks involved.The application is designed to learn the foundational skills of character-sound association and handwriting of the upper-lower case letters, mathematical numbers and mathematical symbols through short and engaging activities with explicit help instructions.It incorporates different learning modes/styles in activities and manages multiple user profiles confidentially. A proposed machine learning algorithm is based on reinforcement learning mechanism functions to select the learning content, measure the learning performance, represent the performance measurement results and record the learning process to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of dyslexic children.

To determine the application’s acceptability by its targeted user population, a user acceptance test was conducted where the respondents were the specialized remedial teachers of dyslexia. A structured set of questions related to learning material and user interface design principles was used to evaluate the application.Considering the unique requirements of this learning application, questions conforming the design variables present in set of Evaluation Criteria, based on the design attributes of System Acceptability Framework by Nielsen , are also added to determine whether the application satisfies targeted user population functional and non-functional requirements.After two weeks period of application usage by potential users, the feedback provided by the respondents revealed that application has great potential to prove very beneficial in terms of awareness, affordability and accessibility in Pakistan. The evaluation results indicated that the application was well-received by the dyslexic children.Both the user interface and learning content structure has justified its role and is in conformance to the needs of the dyslexic children.The evaluation results pointed out that the usage of devised learning algorithm is serving the purpose within the scope of the application.